Accounts Payable Content

There’s nothing attention-grabbing at the board level about efficient transactional processing (unless of course you put a clever spin on it and simply call the latest instantiation of it “AP robotics”). Yet sexy or otherwise, processing transactions is the traditional role of AP.
But given this constraint, how can AP rise up in strategic value and do more than just become more efficient? Perhaps the function needs to explain the value it can bring in terms that executives and stakeholders in the business, customers, suppliers and shareholders can appreciate.

One of the fundamental challenges of A/P strategy and payment in the past (for organizations of all sizes) is that it has not been a scientific or measured exercise. Thomas’ father used to run Northern European sales arms for various US industrial equipment firms, and he would tell his staff that payments to vendors could only be paid a few days past the end of each quarter, once the firm had settled its books! This was to pull cash to central accounts, and then push it back out. In other words, it was a lot of work and supplier frustration over evanescent paper results.